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All Quotes by author - Ben Goldacre
" Alternative therapists don't kill many people, but they do make a great teaching tool for the basics of evidence-based medicine, because their efforts to distort science are so extreme. "
People
Science
Medicine
" Amazing things happen when you pull individual pieces of information together into larger linked datasets: meaning emerges, as you produce facts from figures. "
Amazing
Facts
Information
" Bad things happen when problems are protected by a force field of tediousness. "
Things Happen
Bad
Happen
" Data is the fabric of the modern world: just like we walk down pavements, so we trace routes through data, and build knowledge and products out of it. "
Walk
Like
World
" Doctors and patients need as much data as possible to make an informed decision about what treatment is best. "
Data
Decision
Possible
" I agree, the world would be a better place if doctors were less enthusiastic about adopting very new drugs. "
Place
Better Place
Better
" If a scientist sidesteps their scientific peers, and chooses to take an apparently changeable, frightening and technical scientific case directly to the public, then that is a deliberate decision, and one that can't realistically go unnoticed. "
Technical
Decision
Take
" If you put me in charge of the medical research budget, I would cancel all primary research, I would cancel all new trials, for just one year, and I would spend the money exclusively on making sure that we make the best possible use of the clinical evidence that we already have. "
You
Money
Medical
" In an ideal world, you might imagine that scientific papers were only cited by academics on the basis of their content. This might be true. But lots of other stuff can have an influence. "
Be True
Influence
True
" In general, drug companies are reasonably good at developing new treatments, and there's also a lot of good in the industry. "
New
Good
Lot
" More academics should blog, post videos, post audio, post lectures, offer articles and more. You'll enjoy it: I've had threats and blackmail, abuse, smears and formal complaints with forged documentation. "
More
Abuse
Threats
" Science has authority, not because of white coats, or titles, but because of precision and transparency: you explain your theory, set out your evidence, and reference the studies that support your case. "
Science
Authority
You
" Science isn't about authority or white coats; it's about following a method. That method is built on core principles: precision and transparency; being clear about your methods; being honest about your results; and drawing a clear line between the results, on the one hand, and your judgment calls about how those results support a hypothesis. "
Drawing
Results
Support
" Teaching needs an ecosystem that supports evidence-based practice. It will need better systems to disseminate the results of research more widely, but also a better understanding of research, so that teachers can be critical consumers of evidence. "
Understanding
Need
Practice
" There are many differences between medicine and teaching, but they have much in common. Both involve craft and personal expertise, learned through experience; but both can be informed by the experience of others. "
Craft
Experience
Medicine
" There is actually quite a lot of crossover between the quacks and drug companies. They use the same tricks and tactics to bamboozle people into buying their pills, but drug firms can afford to use slightly more sophisticated versions. "
Lot
Sophisticated
More
" There is this peculiar blind spot in the culture of academic medicine around whether withholding trial results is research misconduct. People who work in any industry can reinforce each others' ideas about what is okay. "
Culture
Ideas
People
" The value of a scientific publication goes beyond this simple benefit, of all relevant information appearing, unambiguously, in one place. It's also a way to communicate your ideas to your scientific peers, and invite them to express an informed view. "
Information
Ideas
Place
" When you prescribe a new drug, often you are prescribing something that has only been tested in a few thousand people for a very short period of time, perhaps only six months, and that's not long enough to know whether there are any medium- or long-term side effects. "
Time
Short
People
" Yes. I'm a doctor, an epidemiologist, and lots of my professional colleagues flip back and forth between industry and medical roles. I know them; they are not bad people. But it is possible for good people in bad systems to do things that inflict enormous harm. "
Good
People
Know
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